Case Number 25414: Small Claims Court

EATERS

The Charge

It's feeding time.

The Case

Italian cinema has a long tradition of second rate zombie movies. Sometimes,
they're gloriously trashy, like Zombie and, sometimes, they're just
trashy, like Hell of the Living Dead. Most of them, though, have a cheap
charm to them that attracts me more than it probably should. With the new influx
of flesh eating freaks in worldwide television and cinema, Italy returns with
Eaters, which maintains that old tradition. It's really not very good,
but when has that ever stopped me?

Some kind of plague has caused the people of the world to become deformed
zombies, with flesh dripping from the bone and an unquenchable thirst for blood.
It started with the women, but quickly affected both genders. Now, with only a
few actual humans left, a pair of bickering hunters and the scientist they work
for search for survivors while battling neo-Nazis and finding the daughter of
the man who might have started the plague.

The box for Eaters displays prominently, "Presented by Uwe
Boll," but don't let that dissuade you from watching the movie. He had
nothing to do with the production, and only agreed to have his name on the cover
to help with sales. It's a lot better than his movies, but that's hardly praise;
there are good points to the film, but not many.

Writer/director Marco Ristori has simply tried to stuff too much into the
film's relatively short running time. Though ninety minutes is pretty standard
for a horror film, between all the concepts and characters he tries to shove in,
two hours probably wouldn't have cut it. Ristori gets some points for trying to
be original; he brings up the idea that the zombies represent some kind of new
human evolution, but he feels the need to explain it so thoroughly that it
shines too bright a light on how ridiculous the concept is and, even with all
that explanation, never gets to a point where it actually makes any sense. This
is compounded by the rival factions, including a bunch of Nazis with an odd
Hitler lookalike leader, and all the banter between the main characters, all of
which makes the story a huge mess.

To its credit, the film has fairly decent zombie makeup and effects for its
budget. It's fairly violent and, if you don't listen to all the random talking
while it's going on, these are things to enjoy about the film. But that's the
problem: in order to explain all the different things going on in Eaters,
the characters never shut up, which makes it a pretty hard film to watch, even
if it delivers on the zombie action.

E1 delivers a decent disc for Eaters, though it's nothing
particularly great. The 2.35:1 image looks pretty good; it's a cheap movie and
it shows, but the transfer is solid enough. There aren't any digital errors to
complain about and black levels are fairly deep. The intentionally washed out
look of the film makes the colors difficult to judge, but it looks sharp
overall. On the audio front, the disc comes with a surprising three mixes. Two
surround tracks in Italian and a stereo mix in English. Oddly, the English one
is the default on the disc, so be sure to change your settings if you want to
avoid a bad overdub. Though I don't know whether the Italian tracks are dubbed
like the old days, they match pretty well. The DTS track is the preferred one,
with nice surround effects and a booming low end. The Dolby surround track is
pretty good, but not quite as dynamic, while the English stereo track sounds
weak in comparison. The only extra on the disc is a fifteen minute making-of
featurette, in which the director adamantly defends Uwe Boll. His argument has
little merit, but I'm sure he's very grateful for the shout-out, so it can be
forgiven.

Eaters plainly tries to do too much, which is its downfall. If it was
just zombie violence, the film would hold some merit for genre fans, but with
terrible dialogue and overplayed conceptual issues, this one is hard to
recommend. It's far from the worst piece of living dead violence I've ever seen,
but it isn't particularly good, either.